A Sea of Islands: Early Foundations and Mobilities of Pacific Islanders

National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study ASIAN AMERICAN PACIFIC ISLANDER ISLANDER AMERICAN PACIFIC ASIAN Finding a Path Forward ASIAN AMERICAN PACIFIC ISLANDER NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS THEME STUDY LANDMARKS HISTORIC NATIONAL NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS THEME STUDY Edited by Franklin Odo Use of ISBN This is the official U.S. Government edition of this publication and is herein identified to certify its authenticity. Use of 978-0-692-92584-3 is for the U.S. Government Publishing Office editions only. The Superintendent of Documents of the U.S. Government Publishing Office requests that any reprinted edition clearly be labeled a copy of the authentic work with a new ISBN. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Odo, Franklin, editor. | National Historic Landmarks Program (U.S.), issuing body. | United States. National Park Service. Title: Finding a Path Forward, Asian American and Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks theme study / edited by Franklin Odo. Other titles: Asian American and Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks theme study | National historic landmark theme study. Description: Washington, D.C. : National Historic Landmarks Program, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2017. | Series: A National Historic Landmarks theme study | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017045212| ISBN 9780692925843 | ISBN 0692925848 Subjects: LCSH: National Historic Landmarks Program (U.S.) | Asian Americans--History. | Pacific Islander Americans--History. | United States--History. Classification: LCC E184.A75 F46 2017 | DDC 973/.0495--dc23 | SUDOC I 29.117:AS 4 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045212 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Publishing Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402-0001 ISBN 978-0-692-92584-3 ii AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study Essay 2 A Sea of Islands: Early Foundations and Mobilities of Pacific Islanders Amy Stillman Director, A/PIA Studies Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor n essay tasked with introducing the Pacific Islands and its inhabitants might begin by acknowledging late 20th century con- A structions that coupled together Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. These range from political alliances, demographic initiatives, and socio-cultural formations that grow out of intersections of Asians and Pacific Islanders in island communities as well as within the continental United States. Among the earliest scholarly endeavors, the “P” or “PI” appears in variant namings, such as in the first iteration of the Association for Asian Pacific American Studies (now Association for Asian American Studies) and, at this writing, the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. In the United States context, it is not difficult to connect Asian and Pacific Islander peoples conceptually via the geographic contiguity of the Asian continent and the Pacific Ocean. While doing so comes at the Portrait of Kaneena, a chief of the Sandwich Islands in the North Pacific Ocean. Drawn by J. Webber; engraved by A.W. Warren, n.d.; courtesy of the Library of Congress. A Sea of Islands: Early Foundations and Mobilities of Pacific Islanders 35 cost of effacing profound historical differences, an Japanese expansion eastward. Third, U.S. involvement absolute adherence to maintaining those very histor- in post-war economic reconstruction in Japan (during ical distinctions also ignores more recent histories of which time the U.S. also took control of the Unit- intersection. Scholarship on Asia and the Pacific Islands ed Nations-mandated Trust Territory of the Pacific, is pursued in two distinctly separate interdisciplinary comprising multiple island groups across the northern fields with attending professional learned societies, Pacific stretching westward from Hawai‘i), followed publication venues, and claims on academic and insti- by subsequent Cold War geopolitics in Korea and tutional resources. Asian Americans and Pacific Island- Southeast Asia, carried over, even as Asian economies ers, especially in the U.S. Possessions, fall in the gaps rebounded. Fourth, by the 1990s, the economic power between ideas of homeland authenticity and diasporic of multinational corporations and transnational trade disconnection, and contrasting narratives of immigra- agreements operating beyond the reach of nation-based tion and indigeneity. The reception and representation regulation were encompassed in the terms “Pacific Rim” of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. is also marked and the touting, especially in the news media, of a “Pacif- by juxtaposition. Asians have endured stereotypes of ic Century.” All of this took place despite the fact that “yellow peril” and “perpetual foreigner,” while Pacific the worlds now linked largely passed over the islands1—a Islanders have historically been valued as desired objects reality made possible by advances in jet transportation of colonialist exoticness. and the capacity to eliminate mid-Pacific refueling stops. Three points of intersection between Asians and The incorporation of Pacific Islanders into a com- Pacific Islanders are relevant to this overview. First, sys- bined “Asian Pacific” construction has been uneven. tematic mass immigration from Asia to the United States, Pacific Islanders have long protested the marginaliza- catalyzed by the 1848 discovery of gold in California, tion and invisibility by—as well as among—their more took place through the Pacific Islands, when transpor- numerous Asian colleagues2 and have since successfully tation routes required provisioning stops between Asia negotiated incorporation into the Native American and North America. Second, Hawai‘i occupies a pivotal and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), formal- point, as capitalist sugar and pineapple plantations ly constituted in 2009. However, federal government brought Asian immigrant laborers in the 1860s, and the policy has been mixed. While Native Hawaiians and multiethnic plantation milieu became the basis for inter- other Pacific Islanders have been disaggregated from the racial marriage and a multicultural community forma- “Asian American” racial category on the U.S. Census, tion already well rooted by the time of the U.S. acquisi- the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and tion of Hawai‘i in 1898. Third, following World War II, Pacific Islanders has maintained a coalition approach, the migration of Pacific Islanders from American-admin- and heritage month celebrations for Native Hawaiians istered areas—Native Hawaiians and Asian descendants and Pacific Islanders continue to be observed in May from Hawai‘i, along with Samoans, Guamanians, and with Asian Americans, rather than in November with residents of the Trust Territory of the Pacific— to the Native Americans. continental United States produced various communi- Beyond considerations about how Pacific Island- ty formations. This was especially true along the west ers and Asian Americans have been grouped together coast, in proximity to neighborhoods settled by Asian bureaucratically, an orientation to Pacific Islanders immigrants, U.S.-born Asian descendants, and Japanese and their oceanic world inevitably casts light on Pacific Americans returning after internment. Islander distinctiveness from Asian cultures and histo- The 20th century development of U.S. political and ries. It also illuminates a key epistemological fault line economic power in the Pacific region can be viewed between systems of knowledge through which Pacific in four steps. First, the U.S. possession of Guam and Islanders have come to be known outside the region. Hawai‘i in 1898 and a portion of Samoa in 1899 marked From the advent of western European presence in the the formal establishment of U.S. colonialism in the Pacific in the early 1500s, the conduct of scholarship Pacific. Second, during World War II, the U.S. military and the circulation of knowledge about the region entered the war involving the Pacific Islands to curb were monopolized by the tenets of western European 36 AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study Enlightenment rationality and empiricism. It has taken 2) volcanic activity as plates move over hot spots in the several generations of Pacific Islander-centered scholars earth’s core, and volcanic activity results in mountainous since the later 20th century to place islander worldviews underwater ranges whose peaks rise above sea level.6 alongside those documented by outsiders.3 Where volcanic activity ceased, many islands eroded, The epochal perspective proposed in this essay pushing up coral reefs ringing the island above sea level takes European presence and Euro-American colonial- until only coral atolls remained. ism as simply another era during which Pacific Islanders Within geological boundaries of the oceanic region, have continued to exist. This is in contradistinction to multiple approaches to defining “Pacific Islands” over generations of scholars who have figured the moments centuries of habitation have shifted based on migration of “first contact” between islanders and outsiders as and settlement patterns, along with the ebb and flow constitutive of radical rupture and irreversible alter- of empires with their structures of trade and tribute. ations in island societies after Euro-American colonial- Through various

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